


Pull my ribs apart

by adnauseam



Category: Dark Matter - Michelle Paver
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gus lives, M/M, Post-Canon, Touch-Starved, reaching out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 05:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18565066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adnauseam/pseuds/adnauseam
Summary: Gus looks at him carefully, sometimes.





	Pull my ribs apart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



 

He wakes up from a dreamless, motionless sleep in gradual increments, hovering in an awful dragging state, unaware of where he is.

He opens his eyes to a murky, cold looking wall. He is heavy, so heavy, too heavy to consider moving and he closes his eyes. When he opens them again he thinks he might have fallen back asleep, but it’s so hard to tell; the wall is the same and his sense of time is uncertain. He is not quite warm.

He rolls over onto his back to see a ceiling that looks much like the wall had. Beside him something makes a small, stifled noise, or he thinks it does, and when he rolls over completely, Gus is next to him, sitting in a dark, wobbly chair, one forearm on the mattress, watching him.

“You’re awake,” he says inanely, looking very pleased.

His eyes are very intent on Jack’s, very kind; impulsively he wants to turn away from them.

Jack’s eyelids droop. He is so tired. It is so intensely lovely to know that Gus is beside him; he cannot feel the warmth from where he is lying but he can imagine, so near to him, how it would be to be touching.

“How are you feeling?” Gus asks, uncertainly and hoarse. He’s tense, more braced against the mattress than resting on it. He doesn’t break the eye contact and Jack is too exhausted to pull away from it either.

It takes him some time and an unimaginable amount of effort to answer. “Not sure,” he says finally. He isn’t. He is stinging all over, but numb, distant from it.

Gus nods and Jack wonders if he looks as pale as Gus does, as harrowed and drained, and still can’t look away from him.

“How much do you remember?” Gus asks, his voice increasingly scratchy and quiet. Jack’s next inhale is too quick and uneven, embarrassingly loud. He opens his mouth but is unable to speak, to find the words, and at last he breaks the eye contact and settles on his back, looking determinedly up at the ceiling.

He remembers – most of it, probably.

After a few halting moments, Jack hears an odd, sliding noise and glances over, throat tight and twisted up, to see Gus leaning further forward, reaching out to rest a hand on Jack’s shoulder, opening his mouth as if to say something, closing it. His right hand is only millimetres from Jack’s hip, and he’s unreasonable afraid, suddenly, like he’s teetering on a cliff’s edge.

He stiffens without really meaning to and Gus pulls away immediately, his back straightening brutally. The look in his eyes is abominably careful and it’s horrible to see, unbearable for him to be careful now when he never had been before. Gus bites his lip still looking at him and frowns slightly.

“Jack,” he says, even his voice careful. Jack wants to scream at him, to shake him, to make him realise that there is nothing to be careful over, that this is fine, that he is fine.

There is something in Gus’s breathing that Jack does not like, too short and too spaced out.

“We’re going to try to leave for next Thursday,” Gus says eventually, with a note of finality, moving very slightly as if to stand up.

“Right,” Jack manages. There is something helpless about the way Gus stands, still looking at Jack, still frowning, hands by his sides.

“Jack,” he says again.

He shakes his head very slightly and walks out of the room.

 

When he wakes next he is more clear-headed; he sits up immediately and takes stock: a small room with a gas light and bare, peeling walls. He is not alone, Algie is sitting in the hard little chair.

“Oh, hello, you’re awake,” he says, nonchalant but not really, eyes very hard and tight. He does not look like he’s slept much.

There is something not right with his feet, Jack realises suddenly, they are unfeeling and swollen, distorted; they do not feel like his own flesh and he is filled with an immediate and overpowering aversion that he has to choke down, rising in his throat like bile. All over he is aching with cold, interspersed with pinpricks of not quite heat, needling at him, but his feet—

Jack is not sure how much of his panic is showing in his eyes, but Algie’s face congeals into a grimace that is nearly a smile and he says: “Gus is in the next room along. He told me he was here when you first woke—“. He pauses, though it isn’t quite a question.

“Yes,” Jack says curtly. He is not sure what to make of any of this.

“He shouldn’t have been, he’s supposed to stay in bed. They don’t—They’re not sure—“

Jack waits with growing impatience.

“Well, the shock of the water and all has set his recovery back a tad,” Algie concludes, not meeting Jack’s eyes.

Well it would, Jack thinks, seeing again how ill Gus had looked in the cabin, how shaky he had been on the stretcher, and something of his irritation must be discernible because Algie hurries to say: “Of course, I mean, it’s the best outcome, of course, I didn’t meant to suggest,” and weirdly, wonderfully, it is comforting to hear that Algie does not blame him for any of it, for not being able to stay it out.

“Yes,” he says again, more awkward than short this time, and the word doesn’t dissipate easily into the air, it lingers. Algie gives him an uncertain, half-nod, and Jack wishes that he was really in a bad enough way that he could just slip back into sleep so that Algie could scuttle off back to Gus’s room, but he isn’t, so they sit together listlessly.

 

The ship to England is worse than the ward in Longyearbyen, which was windowless but at least had air and was at ground level, so he could go outside in his wheelchair during the later days of his stay. On the ship, he’s immobile, essentially confined to his cabin and it gnaws at him terribly. Like a caged animal.

He cultivates a fierce, thick loathing for everybody else, a curdling sort of resentment; they can move around and feel the wind and stretch their legs properly when he cannot. Even Gus is an object for this hatred and he doesn’t go up to the deck much either, on account of still being unwell and finding it hard to breathe and to grip things with his hands, which are blotchy, black and red and white and swollen still.

The three of them spend most days cramped in Jack’s cabin as a result, which is stiflingly awkward and incredibly reassuring – even if they are mostly quiet, it’s enough to hear them moving around him, breathing, existing. He dreads going back to London.

Algie often excuses himself to go up to the deck in the late afternoon, leaving Jack and Gus alone together. He’s too furious and trapped to spare much feeling for intense anxiety or embarrassment, but it still isn’t quite comfortable. Gus will often open his mouth as if to say something and then close it again, and tension rushes through Jack every time. He isn’t sure what he can bear to hear.

But eventually, as they near England, Gus clears his throat and waits until Jack raises his head and meets his gaze.

“Look, Jack,” he starts. Clears his throat again. “Look, I shouldn’t have left,” and it comes out in a rush.

“I don’t want to talk about it—”

He’s too quick, and Gus gives him a strange look. “I meant. Well. Just before, in the hospital, after you woke. It wasn’t fair.”

_Fair_.

“It’s – OK.” Near enough. He understands, he thinks, acutely aware of the sea moving underneath them in slow, sneaking currents.

But Gus is frowning, so he says, “Really,” and smiles as best as he can. He means it, he thinks.

“Jack,” and he falters again. “You will – you will come with me, after we’re done in London, won’t you? To my parents’ house, I mean. You shouldn’t be—”

Jack can feel his jaw going rigid – to be pitied, or to have to be helped, isn’t so bad, not unbearable, he doesn’t want to be alone – only – only to have to accept their money, which is what this really means, he thinks, is so—

And Gus must see, must be able to tell, because he blurts out, “Please, Jack,” and the look on his face is horrid, careful again.

He shifts further away, instinctively, against the tide of feeling rising up in him, and Gus sighs, but that’s that. He’ll go. And it’s true, the thing Gus wasn’t saying. He hasn’t anywhere else.

 

There is something intensely cruel about the rawness of the light fixture swinging against the bare ceiling. He watches it with one eye open from his bunk. He does not want to sleep in the dark even though the direct, glaring light will give him a headache the next day.

There is something insidious and creeping in his chest near his heart that will not go away. It is very small and unreachable; he does not wish it away despite the discomfort. Heartsick.

It’s difficult to come to terms with. When he had finally admitted it to himself, in Gruhuken, that he loved Gus, it had felt bare, pared down to the very bone of the thing; now it feels wobbly and unsure and hard to grasp. He had not thought it would matter concretely, but now they are here and both alive and he isn’t sure where he stands or if there’s anything to be done, if there’s anything that can be done at all.

And to see Gus in person again, after weeks of tapping out messages not capable of fully expressing what he really, fully feels, and to still be stoppered up, constricted – he wonders, looking back, how he had ever managed it, all those years in London, numb and unfeeling; now he feels like he might burst with the immensity of it all, lying here in his bunk longing and alone, but whenever he is with Gus there’s a distance that he doesn’t know how to bridge. If it ever can be bridged.

And so his thoughts circle themselves, collapsing inwards and staggering aimlessly nowhere. Where is he going now – to England, to London, back to what exactly? He turns over into the mattress and closes his eyes, eyelids red and aching and itching with the light overhead blaring. Gus is in the next room over. He can’t sleep.

 

He is unreal and faded standing on the threshold to Gus’s parents’ house. There’s a fleeting moment in which everything is manageable, the world pausing from its orbit and the light taking on a dusty, golden quality, before everything rushes forwards and Gus’s mother, diminutive and full of concern, darts forward to greet him, and to tell him that she’s glad to see him. Jack doesn’t think of his mother at all, he hasn’t properly for years, but there’s something oddly familiar about it, to be fussed over.

The conversation jumps bewilderingly between mundane local news and gossip and haltering, largely unsuccessful enquiries about the expedition. Both of Gus’s parents thank him for saving their son, several times, and Jack doesn’t let himself look to Gus himself at these moments. It feels, already, so long ago, like something somebody else did, and yet as he thinks of it, it sears in his throat, free fall in his stomach; he would rather not think of it and does his best not to normally.

 

At nights, though.

In the night at Longyearbyen or on the journey to England, he had managed to sleep, somehow, though it was disturbed and fragmented, but perhaps his body is healing well enough now that it has enough energy to keep vigilance in the dark.

Now he lies rigidly on his side with his hip digging painfully into the mattress, staring out at the dark. He cannot let himself close his eyes. He cannot move. Fear is urgent in him.

He thinks about breaking his stillness, rolling over to face the wall, closing his eyes, slipping into sleep. During the day he scoffs at himself for not being able to, thinks himself absurd. But now – in the dark –

His leg twitches. His heartbeat is mad in his stomach, escaped, inescapable. He watches the door.

His thoughts twist into themselves. Maybe—

_Move_ , he tells himself. But he can’t quite. _Move_.

 

Another night, arms wrapped tightly around himself, holding still and tense in the dark and watching the doorway.

It could be any time, in the night, but he thinks it must be the small hours of the morning, which always drag on and on and on; it’s always like this, and that strikes him suddenly as intensely discomforting. This is the time when he feels most alive, able to think without restraint, but nothing changes, not ever.

He watches the doorway.

_Nothing is coming_ , he tells himself. _You are entirely alone_ , but that isn’t reassuring somehow. He is intensely small in this bed, pushed over to one side, sleeping like he’s still in a ship’s bunk, a cabin’s bunk, his own narrow mattress in London, concentrated in himself and reaching no further than his own cold skin.

_Move_ , he thinks and suddenly he is, startling to life, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing, dizzy with it, grasping for his crutches, dragging his body over to the door, resting a hand against the doorframe, listening, listening, listening, and pushing it open, creaking into the black, waiting hallway—

—and there the momentum stops. He breathes in and out, once, twice, three times. Decides to walk to the bathroom, splash his face with cold water. Go to sleep.

Only then he hears something, a stir of movement to his right, and he startles, heart rabbiting like mad in his chest, and a rush of adrenaline courses through him – _this is it_ , he thinks, but then—

“Jack.”

From the low settee between their rooms, Gus looks up towards him, hardly discernible in dark but a solid physical presence regardless, and the air of the hallway feels different somehow.

But he’s so small, in the dark there. He looks like Jack feels at night, diminished. It makes things seem possible.

There’s a sharp stab of pain in his leg and he must wince because Gus says “Jack,” again, into the long cool corridor, and grasps Jack’s wrist suddenly, like he wasn’t expecting to, or wasn’t fully conscious of the movement; he looks as startled as Jack by it, and the corridor holds its breath.

Bizarrely he feels the touch not where it is, on his wrist, but instead sparking and shivering on the left side of his hip and very lightly in a brand across his right side.

It’s like sitting in the bathtub and looking through the water at his legs, slightly distorted, the hair very dark and untouched against his skin. It’s like running down the street to his house when he was young, heart fierce and fit to burst; it’s like stumbling through the icy shallows of an ocean beginning in the dark towards some sort of light. He feels it _here_ and _here_.

And he does, he does, he thinks, want to be touched.

He wants to sway into it, to smooth over the awful keening in his chest, the overwhelming choke of emotion in his throat, but he holds himself rigid and tight instead, blinks twice very exactly. Gus’s fingers are against his pulse point. He imagines the heat of it seeping into his blood, searing through his body.

The skin underneath his fingernails is tingling.

“Jack,” Gus says again and his voice is so uncertain, so unsure, and when Jack meets his gaze his expression is careful again, so very like how it had been in Longyearbyen, and Jack realises that perhaps he has misread it; perhaps it was a different kind of carefulness all along. 

“Come on,” Gus says, “sit down,” and Jack nods.

They sit side by side for several minutes, not saying anything. Gus is a long line of warmth against Jack’s side. Jack’s breathing eases.

“I know there isn’t much that can be done,” Gus says finally, “but you can—” he breaks off. “I’m here.”

There’s an earnestness to the words that is hard to hear.

“Yes,” he says and turns his face away at the sound of his own voice.

“Hard to sleep,” he admits.

Gus only nods in reply. And he must be having the same problem, sitting out here in the corridor in the middle of the night; Jack feels awful, not to have realised, and with that he relaxes, all at once, into the settee low across his back, into Gus at his side.

Gus lets out a long breath that Jack hadn’t known he was holding. And he shifts, a small movement that flickers in Jack’s chest, and rests his head carefully on Jack’s shoulder. His nose is a cold point on Jack’s skin as he turns in towards him. Jack is light, shaky. It’s so warm and close to him.

In turn, he lets himself rest his cheek on Gus’s head, lets himself settle there into the moment as they face out together into the dark.

“It’ll be OK, I think,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he agrees firmly and Gus laughs, low. He can feel it in his own chest.

He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t want to move at all, and so doesn’t but neither does Gus, so they just stay there, collapsed against each other. Jack lets himself close his eyes and drift, secure.

 

He wakes to an overriding impression of warmth and closeness, in an unfamiliar dark. He remembers where he is, who he is with. Dawn must be breaking, thin fingers of blue reaching around the edges of the heavy curtains towards where he is sprawled against Gus, his head wedged between the settee and Gus’s side.

Gus stirs and Jack tenses, shifting his weight off a little. Gus moves out from under him and squeezes his hand slightly, twisting to face him. His face is – very close.

"Jack," Gus says lowly, "We had better – the maids will be up here soon, we should get back to our rooms."

It’s an admission that whatever this is, it’s something, and they both know it. Jack says nothing; the shape of this thing between them is large and weighty, but it hangs in the air between them oddly fragile, and he dares not break it.

 

“Perhaps we ought to try and get as far as the copse today,” Gus says casually over breakfast.

His father nods, bleary eyed, says, "Yes, get your strength up," and nods a few times more over his bacon.

Jack meets Gus's eyes directly in low, thrilling anticipation.

The ground is springy and soft under his feet; his crutch stabbing into the earth with little resistance. His gait is still awkward, and he supposes it always will be. May result in early onset arthritis, the doctor had said about Gus's hands. Neither of them is fully whole anymore.

He raises his head to watch Gus, perhaps two steps ahead of him, his hair glinting in the morning sunlight and catching on his cheek; as Jack stares at him, he turns around and says, "I think that's a hare," and points in the direction of the copse, where a hare is indeed crouching on the edge of the lawn, ears twitching, quivering in the shade amongst the clover.

The air is cool but not cold, brushing very softly against Jack’s cheek. 

Every inhalation is lighter than air in his lungs, a soaring ebullience, so that he feels as though he is floating, gliding across the lawn, every breath so dear, rising above the wretchedness of his body, which strains with effort, agonising on his right ankle; these things are immaterial, the pain might as well be happening to someone else.

They go through a lopsided gate and walk through the silver birch copse, small, light green leaves catching the sun in pools of gold light, waving in the light breeze to the sound of birdsong. They are covered by the trees and cannot be seen from the house, but they walk on anyway, Jack’s teeth gritted and his arms straining.

They come to a stop by the low wall that marks the end of the copse and the end of Balfour land. Beyond it there is a river, shining, and beyond that a field of cows.

Jack leans on the wall, pleasantly warmed by the sun, and grins at Gus next to him. Gus sways into him, pressing their shoulders together unhurriedly.

“Lovely day,” Gus says, in the same casual tone he’d used with his father at breakfast, and they laugh together. It feels so ridiculous suddenly.

He presses closer to Gus and closes his eyes against the sun. His eyelids glow in a brilliant shade of red as Gus kisses the edge of his jaw.

I’m _here_ , he thinks joyously, and laughs again. He’s _here_.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Elbow song _Ribcage_. 
> 
> I loved reading your letter, PositivelyVexed, and only wish I could have written for all of your prompts!


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